Uplink utilization with V2V2R communications in clustered vehicular networks

This paper considers scheduling of vehicle to vehicle to roadside unit (V2V2R) communications in a clustered vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) in order to improve uplink utilization. A novel communication model is proposed to increase amount of data that can be uploaded from cluster of vehicles to the roadside unit, where each vehicle has its own data. In addition to direct V2R communications, V2V2R communications are effectively employed for this purpose. A store and forward mechanism is used for scheduling V2V2R communications. It is assumed vehicles constitute a cluster. Under the control of the cluster head, vehicles which would have idle time while staying in the range of RSU, volunteers to relay other vehicles' data if necessary. V2V2R resource sharing problem is modeled as a linear programming problem without compromising scalability. Simulations proved that the proposed model achieves significantly higher uplink utilization compared to earliest deadline based and first come first served based scheduling algorithms.